The number of children born behind bars has almost doubled since Labour came to power, with new figures showing women prisoners currently giving birth at nearly four a week.

Figures from the Ministry of Justice show that 283 children were born in prisons in England and Wales between April 2005 and July this year, an average of 1.7 a week. But 49 babies were born between April and the beginning of July this year alone, almost four a week, meaning the 2008 total could reach nearly 200 if births continue at the same rate, more than double the 64 prison births recorded in 1995-96 before Labour came to power.

Prison reformers demanded that women should be locked up only in extreme circumstances, saying that keeping mothers and young babies in prison can harm young children and does nothing to cut crime.

The number of women in jail has nearly doubled in the past decade and stands at more than 4,500. Most women are in for non-violent offences, with about a third jailed for theft or handling stolen goods; in 2006, nearly two-thirds served less than six months.

Bickering over who should represent Poland at the intergovernmental level threatens to spill over into a second EU summit, after the political party of Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said he will stay home on 7 November if the president goes to Brussels.

"If the president insists, the premier won't go. Let the president put forward Poland's position on the [financial] crisis alone," a senior member of Mr Tusk's liberal Civic Platform party told Polish newspaper Dziennik on Sunday.

Mr Tusk (l) and Mr Kaczynski saw the last summit dominated by coverage of who used which plane to fly to Brussels

"The president has already confirmed his plans. He's spoken with the French [EU presidency]. From what we hear, there are no problems to have two chairs," said Adam Bielan, a spokesman for President Lech Kaczynski's conservative Law and Justice faction.

The two leaders both turned up for the last EU summit on 15 October, with an angry Mr Tusk forced at times to send away his foreign minister and finance minister from the top table to let the president take one of Poland's official seats.

The freshly appointed UK defence secretary has publicly supported the idea of a European army, a key ambition of the French EU presidency.

Speaking to the country's Sunday Times newspaper yesterday (26 October), John Hutton, who took on the defence portfolio on 3 October, was asked about the prospects for an EU force.

UK defence secretary Hutton is supportive of French designs for an EU army

He said: "I think we've got to be pragmatic about those things. I think that's perfectly sensible. France is one of our closest allies, and the French believe very strongly in this type of role. If we can support it, we should."

French President Nicholas Sarkozy, whose country currently chairs the EU's six-month rotating presidency, wants the bloc's existing military framework to have a new headquarters and each member state to commit 1,500 troops to rapid reaction forces.

The Czech Republic is being unfairly painted as an EU villain ahead of its presidency next year, Czech foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg has said as the country gears up to take over the EU chair in January.

The Czech Republic's reputation as a highly eurosceptic country is "false," Mr Schwarzenberg told French daily Le Monde in an interview published on Saturday (25 October).

Mr Schwarzenberg (l) shaking hands with French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner

"We are not more eurosceptic that other countries in Europe, and I regret that we are being presented as the bad [characters] in the play," he said.

Referring to the country's outspoken EU-hostile president, Vaclav Klaus, the diplomat underlined he "has his own opinions," but added that "it is the government that forms foreign and European policy."

The financial crisis and the threat of recession are revealing German Chancellor Angela Merkel's weaknesses and could contribute to a dramatic change in her party's prospects in next year's election. The Social Democrats, sensing an opportunity, are already planning their attack.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel had not seemed quite this alone for some time as she stood posing for a photograph surrounded by the 16 male governors of Germany's states. The men, smiling their politicians' smiles, look more grim than friendly, while Merkel's smile seems more tortured than anything else.

The biggest mosque in Germany opened in the city of Duisburg on Sunday and has already become a symbol of successful integration. Unlike other mosque projects in Germany, there was virtually no protest from the local community.

The tent next to the mosque in the Marxloh district of Duisburg, an industrial and mining town in the Ruhr region of Germany, can accommodate 3,500 people but it wasn't big enough for the crowd that turned out on Sunday.

Thousands of Duisburg citizens had to stand outside to witness this historic day on a giant public viewing screen. The biggest mosque in Germany has been opened and it includes a meeting center for the whole district -- an unprecedented project in Germany.

Britain and Syria cancelled a planned joint press conference of their foreign ministers in London today as the fall-out continued over an American military raid into Syrian territory that left eight civilians dead.

The attack threatens to overshadow what was a long-planned visit to London by Walid Muallem, the Syrian Foreign Minister, aimed at repairing the two countries' rocky relationship under the leadership of Tony Blair.

Damascus has been incensed by the attack, which Washington has yet to comment on. David Miliband had hoped to capitalise on Syria's desire for stronger ties with the West to persuade it towards a more active role in the search for Middle Eastern peace. But talks today will inevitably be dominated by Syrian protest over the American military action.

A statement from the Foreign Office said that British and Syrian officials "have agreed that it would not be appropriate to hold a formal press conference as planned." The Syrian Embassy, however, confirmed that Mr Muallem would go ahead with a solo briefing at which he was expected to denounce the incursion.

American Nato officers have been renting a villa near Naples for years that belongs, indirectly, to Antonio Iovine, a clan chieftain of the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia.

Mr Iovine, 44, nicknamed "o'ninno" -- the baby -- because of his small stature, is wanted for murder and other crimes, and is listed among the 30 most dangerous criminals in Italy. He has been on the run for 12 years.

According to an investigation that was published in Corriere della Sera yesterday the villa of Mr Iovine may be only the tip of an iceberg. Italian police sources suggested that there were scores of similar cases in the Naples area of Nato service personnel living in houses that were owned by the Camorra. There are several Nato facilities in the area, notably a US telecommunications centre in Bagnoli and the US Air Force base at Capodichino.

"It's ludicrous, isn't it? The coffers of Nato, to which Italy also contributes, are helping to fill the coffers of the Camorra," Franco Roberti, the co-ordinator of the local anti-Mafia bureau, said.

President Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia has announced that he is replacing his prime minister.

"We took a joint decision with Lado Gurgenidze that he will no longer serve as prime minister," the president told a meeting of MPs.

He did not say why the decision was made. It is not clear if it was linked to Georgia's war with Russia in August.

Mr Saakashvili said he was promoting Georgia's ambassador to Turkey, Grigol Mgaloblishvili, to prime minister.

The EU on Monday, Oct. 27 welcomed a ceasefire deal in Somalia as NATO successfully completed its first anti-piracy mission off the Somali coast. But experts questioned the current international efforts to combat piracy.

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer stressed the importance of cooperation between the two Brussels-based institutions during a regular meeting of ambassadors at the alliance's headquarters.

One area in which the two organizations are working together is in the fight against pirates operating in the Gulf of Aden.

While the EU's own operations are to begin shortly, de Hoop Scheffer announced that NATO had just completed its first anti-piracy mission by escorting a cargo ship delivering supplies to the African Union Mission to Somalia.

An Italian destroyer as well as British and Greek frigates arrived in the Gulf of Aden last week as the front guard of NATO's anti-piracy Operation Allied Provider.

The European Commission wants to ban smoking in bars and restaurants across the European Union, officials in Brussels said Monday, Oct. 27.

However, discussions on a smoking ban in all of the member states' workplaces are still at the preliminary stage, meaning any new rules are unlikely to be implemented before 2010.

"Clearly one of the areas which we would like to see covered (by the ban) is bars, restaurants and pubs, which are enclosed spaces where workers on a daily basis are exposed to passive smoking and to the consequences that passive smoking has on their own health and safety," said Chantal Hughes, spokeswoman of EU employment commissioner Vladimir Spidla.

Smoking bans currently differ widely across the EU. While Ireland was the first EU country to make its pubs and restaurants smoke-free, puffing cigarettes is still allowed in some pubs in Germany and Belgium. And smoking is still common in both bars and restaurants in central and Eastern European countries like Hungary and Romania.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Germany last week hosted Uzbekistan's powerful security chief, Rustam Inoyatov, despite his links to the 2005 Andijan massacre and the jailing, also last week, of a prominent human rights activist.

Mr Inoyatov flew to Germany on 23 October for official business as part of a delegation from Uzbekistan's National Security Service (SNB), and was still in Germany on 25 October.

A passenger jet in Uzbekistan. German authorities declined to confirm or deny the NGO reports

His trip was confirmed by NGOs Human Rights Watch and the Open Society Institute. The German interior ministry - responsible for security - denied holding any meetings with the SNB chief. The German embassy in Tashkent and the German secret service, the BND, declined to comment.

The trip was within the letter of EU law. Mr Inoyatov is one of eight names on an EU visa ban list, which was temporarily suspended in April and will permanently expire in November in line with an EU foreign ministers decision of 13 October.

Dutch parents increasingly take their children to school by car. This makes the roads around schools less safe - and when it's time for them to go it alone, these kids have difficulty in coping with traffic.

Working mums Rebecca Verwey and Debbie Molier are standing on the square that separates three primary schools in a large new housing development Ypenburg in The Hague. Parents that drive their kids to schools? They do not have a good word to say about them. "They drive up too fast, open car doors without looking and in the mornings they park on the pavement to be as close to the school entrance as possible," Verwey says.

In the northern province of Groningen, councillors have had enough and are planning to ban parents from taking their children to school by car. And primary schools in the southern town of Gorinchem have already imposed a one-day ban "to make parents think".

In 1996, Robert Remiás, a witness in the case of a botched action by the Slovakian secret service against the country's President (they kdnapped his son, made him drunk, and wanted Austrian police to catch him for drunken driving) was blown up in a car bomb. Later investigators found ties to the Slovakian mafia.

Ahead of the 1998 elections in Hungary, a series of bombs went up  at the homes of politicians in Budapest. The same year, there were mafia executions, too -- the worst of them a car bomb against a police informant also killing three bystanders (the first mafia hit job with 'collateral damage').

In all of these cases, investigators followed trails to the same organisator: a certain Jozef Rohác, a mafioso with links to the Mečiar-era secret service.

However, Rohác disappeared. But in the early morning of last Sunday, he was caught by Czech police in Prague -- for drunken driving... It took them 10 hours to get the identity of the man.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

A Swindon musician has become a hit on the internet after writing a song about the credit crunch.

Alex Yeoman wrote and filmed a video under the name Antan Debt and has now had hundreds of thousands of hits online.

WARSAW: Poles were jolted last week by the sudden discovery that they were not immune to the financial crisis contagion rippling across the globe. The plunging stock market here and the drastic weakening of the Polish currency proved, as in so many corners of the fast-growing developing world, how wrong they were.

The go-go atmosphere in Poland has abruptly stilled to a cautious wait-and-see. Developers across the country have halted building projects for thousands of apartments as banks have grown stingy with lending. The boomtown energy here has been replaced by nervous eyeing of the once powerful zloty, as it retreats in value against the dollar and the euro.

The daily newspaper Dziennik summed up the mood on Friday with a front-page headline, "Welcome to the Tough Times." In a country that seemed to be on the fast track to full membership in the Western club, the question on everyone's lips is, "Why us?"

Emerging markets that seemed healthy, even thriving, barely a month ago, are beginning to find themselves caught in the worldwide panic. This sharp turn has caught even the local financial guardians and experts by surprise, as they have clung to their indicators of fundamental economic soundness, while forgetting that capital stampedes rarely tarry for fine distinctions.

"I haven't forgotten history," says Gert Heinz, a tax adviser in Munich. "If you depend on paper money you can lose everything. We've learned that the hard way after two world wars."

So when Chancellor Angela Merkel went on television recently to tell Germans that their bank accounts were safe, Heinz, who at 68 still remembers the rows of canned food that his mother hoarded in the attic, decided he would rather be safe than sorry.

He converted another chunk of his savings into gold and stocked up on a six-month supply of rice, sugar, flour and a special brand of milk powder that lasts for half a century.

Heinz may be an extreme example, but he is not alone among Europeans who are looking for ways to protect themselves in the face of a financial storm that - at least so far - has affected them much less directly than it has many Americans. Indeed, his reaction reflects the history of a Continent that has weathered wars, revolutions and financial crises over the centuries, burnishing national convictions that are very different from those in the United States.

A bank which provides investment to Eastern Europe has welcomed a decision by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help Ukraine and Hungary.

The IMF is to offer a $16.5bn (£10.4bn) loan to Ukraine and has agreed an as yet undisclosed package with Hungary.

"I think that is a very helpful role of the IMF," Erik Berglof at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) told BBC News.

Hungary's currency has gone up slightly on Monday against the euro.

NEW YORK: Five straight quarters of losses and a 70 percent slide in its stock this year have not stopped Merrill Lynch from allocating about $6.7 billion to pay bonuses.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, both still on track for profitable years, have set aside about $13 billion for bonuses after three quarters, down 28 percent from a year ago. Even some employees at Lehman Brothers, which declared the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history last month, will get the same bonus they received a year ago.

The worst U.S. financial crisis since the Great Depression, a $700 billion bailout, public outcry over excessive pay and the demise of three of the biggest securities firms will not deter Wall Street from offering year-end rewards to employees, compensation experts say.

"Critical producers and critical managers will be retained with the same bonus they had last year," said Robert Sloan, head of U.S. financial-services recruiting at Egon Zehnder International, an executive-search firm in New York. "The others will see sharp cuts."

Forecasters Race to Call the Bottom to the Market

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
Published: October 26, 2008, NYT

How low can the markets go? Some analysts are getting attention with pessimistic predictions, even if ill-founded.

Financial forecasters are in a race to call the bottom to the bear market. And just as on the way up, when analysts competed for attention with their forecasts of bigger and bigger gains, the financial pundit class now seems compelled to out-gloom the next guy.

"To make a crazy forecast today is not crazy," said Owen Lamont, a former professor at Yale who has studied economic forecasting. "It's not crazy to predict the Dow is going to 2,000. That's in the realm of possibility."

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And even if a forecast is off-base, there are few repercussions because they are almost always quickly forgotten. "The reason that people do these games is because no one's really tracking accuracy," said Mr. Lamont, who now works at DKR Capital, a hedge fund in Greenwich, Conn. "No one is carefully, prudently giving more business to the guy who is 2 percent more accurate than the next guy."

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Still, forecasters who get too far ahead of themselves would do well to remember an instance of notoriously poor prognostication. One of the few times that a financial strategist has been widely taken to task came in 1999, when Kevin A. Hassett and James K. Glassman published "Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market."

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Still, while the reputation of its authors may have taken a hit, "Dow 36,000" has not seemed to hurt their careers. Mr. Hassett, who did not respond to a reporter's inquiry, works at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group in Washington, and serves as the senior economic adviser to the presidential campaign of Senator John McCain.

Britain's financial system faces the possibility of further instability, with the health of insurers and hedge funds among the current areas of concern, the Bank of England warned on Tuesday.

In its twice-yearly Financial Stability Report, the Bank talked not only of significant risks remaining for the banking system - in spite of the £50bn bail-out that in recent weeks has shown signs of bringing some stability - but it also highlighted other potential worries.

Describing the instability in the global financial system as "the most severe in living memory", Sir John Gieve, deputy governor for financial stability, said: "With a global economic downturn under way, the financial system remains under strain."

Looking beyond the banks to other risks, the report said: "One risk is that leveraged investors, like hedge funds, may be forced to liquidate asset holdings due to tight credit conditions."

It added that hedge funds have recently faced "additional funding pressures due to redemption requests and a risk is that these could increase".

The International Monetary Fund may soon lack the money to bail out an ever growing list of countries crumbling across Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia, raising concerns that it will have to tap taxpayers in Western countries for a capital infusion or resort to the nuclear option of printing its own money.

...

The IMF, led by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has the power to raise money on the capital markets by issuing `AAA' bonds under its own name. It has never resorted to this option, preferring to tap members states for deposits.

The nuclear option is to print money by issuing Special Drawing Rights, in effect acting as if it were the world's central bank. This was done briefly after the fall of the Soviet Union but has never been used as systematic tool of policy to head off a global financial crisis.

There has to be a first time for everything, but IMHO bailing out Western™ creditors is a bad use of the IMF's money. Funding trade guarantees is a better use of it.

A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith

KUALA LUMPUR: In a vast office at the top of one of the world's tallest buildings, former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad sits at a broad, glass-topped desk, scribbling his thoughts on a pad of unlined paper.

For 22 years Mahathir was the most powerful person in this land, and his thoughts were commands as he reshaped the country in his own grand image.

But he has become an irritant and a spoiler five years after stepping down, turning against his handpicked successor, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, and he has fallen victim to the press controls he perfected as prime minister.

It is mainly a system of self-censorship in an atmosphere of pressure and intimidation that produces an obedient press and has seen the closure or banning of many publications.

"Where is the press freedom?" he exclaimed two years ago, apparently surprised to be suddenly ignored. "Broadcast what I have to say! What I say is not even accurately published in the press!"

In late September, China's third manned space mission went off without a hitch. The Shenzhou-7 is now safely in orbit. Close by is the BX-1 "companion satellite" which was attached to Shenzhou-7 and later deployed via a simple spring mechanism. This satellite weighs between 30 and 40 kilograms, and it simply orbits around Shenzhou-7, sending back over a thousand images of Shenzhou-7 in the process.

While Western space experts may be divided over the exact purpose of the BX-1 mission, it is clear that China has every intention of driving its dynamic "dual use" space agenda as far as it will go. BX-1 could well be little more than a peaceful probe merely engaged in "close proximity" operations with cameras and transmission equipment aboard. Or it could be a prototype satellite attack dog, a space surveillance and Space Situational Awareness (SSA) platform with anti-satellite (ASAT) capabilities, all rolled into a single menacing platform ready to pounce.

The ASAT dimension seems extremely far-fetched, and many experts dispel talk of it. Nevertheless, this potential ASAT angle surfaced quickly as the result of a close flyby involving Shenzhou-7, with BX-1 in tow, and the International Space Station (ISS).

BAGHDAD _ The U.S. military has warned Iraq that it will shut down military operations and other vital services throughout the country on Jan. 1 if the Iraqi government doesn't agree to a new agreement on the status of U.S. forces or a renewed United Nations mandate for the American mission in Iraq.

Many Iraqi politicians view the move as akin to political blackmail, a top Iraqi official told McClatchy Sunday.

In addition to halting all military actions, U.S. forces would cease activities that support Iraq's economy, educational sector and other areas _ "everything" _ said Tariq al Hashimi, the country's Sunni Muslim vice president. "I didn't know the Americans are rendering such wide-scale services."

Hashimi said that Army Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, listed "tens" of areas of potential cutoffs in a three-page letter, and he said the implied threat caught Iraqi leaders by surprise.

"It was really shocking for us," he said. "Many people are looking to this attitude as a matter of blackmailing."

WASHINGTON: The White House has backed away from using American commandos for further ground raids into Pakistan after furious complaints from its government, relying instead on an intensifying campaign of airstrikes by the Central Intelligence Agency against militants in the Pakistani mountains.

According to American and Pakistani officials, attacks by remotely piloted Predator aircraft have increased sharply in frequency and scope in the past three months.

Through Sunday, there were at least 18 Predator strikes since the beginning of August, some deep inside Pakistan's tribal areas, compared with 5 strikes during the first seven months of 2008.

At the same time, however, officials said that relying on airstrikes alone, the United States would be unable to weaken Al Qaeda's grip in the tribal areas permanently. Within the government, advocates of the ground raids have argued that only by sending Special Operations forces into Pakistan can the United States successfully capture suspected operatives and interrogate them for information about top Qaeda leaders.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier heads to Pakistan Monday for talks expected to focus on the worsening conflict in Afghanistan and the financial crisis, the German government said.

Steinmeier will meet Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi in Islamabad, German Foreign Ministry spokesman Andreas Peschke said at a news conference.

 

After Pakistan, Steinmeier, who is set to challenge Angela Merkel in elections next September as the Social Democratic candidate for the chancellery, will visit Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Peschke said.

Problems caused by climate change are more serious than the current financial crisis. That warning by a leading economist came as German scientists weighed in with their own grim predictions about rising sea levels.

It would be a big mistake for leaders to ignore climate change during the financial crisis, said Nicholas Stern, a former British Treasury economist, who released a seminal report in 2006 that said inaction on emissions blamed for global warming could cause economic pain equal to the Great Depression.

"That's a very important lesson, tackle risk early," Stern told a climate and carbon conference in Hong Kong.

There have been worries that countries will be unwilling to commit to climate change goals at an international meeting scheduled in Copenhagen at the end of next year. Stern said he was optimistic that countries would agree to reduce carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2050.

Both John McCain and Barack Obama have been critical of Russia, particularly in light of the Georgian crisis. But Moscow favors the young Democrat over the Cold War veteran.

John McCain's US presidential campaign begged at the enemy's door this week when a wayward fundraising letter reached the desk of Russia's UN envoy Vitaly Churkin in New York asking for a donation.

 

The Russians wouldn't spare a ruble for the Republican, and sent McCain a sardonic message saying that, unlike the United States, the Russian government does "not finance political activity in foreign countries." US laws would have prevented them from donating had they wanted to send McCain a check.

 

Russian officials, in fact, aren't banking on either McCain or Democratic candidate Barack Obama mending relations upturned by Russia's recent war with US-ally Georgia.

NAIROBI: Hundreds of furious protesters hurled rocks at a United Nations compound in eastern Congo on Monday in frustration that peacekeepers have not halted the rebel advance that is sweeping the countryside.

The rebels are now in control of several major towns and the headquarters of a national park where endangered mountain gorillas live in the middle of a shrinking ring of safety.

Jaya Murthy, a spokesman for Unicef in the eastern Congo city of Goma, said heavy fighting was raging in several areas between government troops and rebel forces under the command of Laurent Nkunda, a renegade general who says he is fighting to protect ethnic Tutsis.

Murthy said that the conflict was spawning a vast wave of internally displaced people, with tens of thousands fleeing battle zones, often for the second or third time in recent months. As many as 250,000 people have been driven from their homes since the fighting between the rebels and government forces intensified in August.

Syria's foreign minister has accused the US of an act of "criminal and terrorist aggression" over what it says was a helicopter raid on its territory.

Walid Muallem said Sunday's attack saw four US aircraft travel eight miles inside Syrian airspace from Iraq and kill eight unarmed civilians on a farm.

He said those who died were a father and his three children, a farm guard and his wife, and a fisherman.

The US has not confirmed or denied the alleged raid.

In an interview with SPIEGEL, American neoconservative scholar and McCain adviser Robert Kagan speaks about the legacy of the Bush-Cheney years, America's future position atop a "League of Democracies" and how China and Russia will push Europe back into America's arms.

SPIEGEL: Dr. Kagan, many intellectual forerunners and former friends of the president are now distancing themselves from him, and some are even attacking him as a failure. You are missing from the list of neoconservatives performing a mea culpa. Have you never given George W. Bush advice that you regret?

 Kagan: "America remains number one, even though other, new players are increasingly challenging it in that role." Robert Kagan: Well, I mostly regret the advice not taken, not advice that I have given. But I can already tell what's next: the Iraq war...

SPIEGEL: ...and you were undoubtedly one of its intellectual fathers. You spoke of "regime change" early on and of the need to forcefully remove Saddam Hussein from power.

Kagan: I was hardly alone. So did the Clinton administration and a majority of the US Senate. I believe that military intervention to bring down a foreign government should be the exception. But, in the case of Saddam, who was pursuing an aggressive foreign policy and was threatening his neighbors, even the rest of the world, I thought it was necessary. I can't believe that people think that we would be better off if that inhuman dictator were still in power.

KIGALI, Rwanda -- C'est la vie.

In another blow to the language of love, the Rwandan government has decided to change instruction in schools from French to English.

All government employees are now required to learn English, and everyone here from lawmakers to taxi drivers to students to businesspeople seems to believe that the usefulness of French, introduced by Belgian colonizers, is coming to an end.

[...]

Rwanda has accused the French of arming the former Rwandan army and ethnic Hutu militias, even as they carried out the 1994 genocide. About 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days of planned, systematic violence.

The Rwandan government recently accused 33 senior French military and political officials of direct involvement in the genocide, demanding that they stand trial. Among those implicated is François Mitterand, president of France at the time of the genocide and now deceased.

French officials have denied responsibility, conceding only that "political" errors were made. In 2006, a French judge accused Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who led the Tutsi rebel group that eventually stopped the genocide, of being involved in the downing of a plane carrying his predecessor, President Juvénal Habyarimana, whose death in April 1994 gave Hutu leaders the pretext to begin the genocide.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is very critical of U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama's positions on Iran, according to reports that have reached Israel's government.

Sarkozy has made his criticisms only in closed forums in France. But according to a senior Israeli government source, the reports reaching Israel indicate that Sarkozy views the Democratic candidate's stance on Iran as "utterly immature" and comprised of "formulations empty of all content."

The Dalai Lama has called a special meeting of Tibetan exiles to discuss the future of their struggle as talks with China have foundered, officials said Tuesday.

The unusual meeting comes after the Dalai Lama told Tibetans on Saturday that he has given up on efforts to persuade Beijing to allow greater autonomy for Tibet under Chinese rule and he would now ask the Tibetan people to decide how to move forward.

The five-day meeting, scheduled for mid-November, will be attended by representatives of all the Tibetan exile communities and political organizations, said Karma Choephal, speaker of the self-declared Tibetan Parliament-in-exile.

The meeting could mark a significant shift in the Tibetan strategy for confronting China, long dominated by the Dalai Lama's "middle way," which rejected calls for outright independence but argued that greater autonomy was needed to preserve Tibet's unique Buddhist culture.

"Anything can come up in the meeting," Choephal told The Associated Press. "The outcome of the meeting will have a democratic and moral bearing on the future thinking of the Tibetan leadership."

According to a recent analysis by Minqi Li, economics professor at the University of Utah, the world economy must contract at a historically rapid clip -- at an annual rate of about -1 to -3.4 percent between now and 2050 -- if atmospheric carbon dioxide is to be held below 445 parts per million (ppm). That is the level at which we could run into a nightmare scenario in which warming could start feeding on itself in positive-feedback loops and lead to who knows what. Much deeper cuts are needed to get down to 350 ppm, at which the planet will remain in a familiar and comfortable condition.

The -1 to -3.4 percent economic reductions required just to reach the more modest goal of 445 ppm were computed by assuming a wide range of scenarios. That range in negative-growth estimates covers a range of scenarios going from dramatic to modest improvements in energy efficiency and alternative technologies. But in all scenarios, however rosy their assumptions, economic growth will have to be thrown into reverse or else. Everything depends on how that economic contraction is handled.

The US economy declined by about 55 percent in just four years at the start of the Great Depression, with the well-known catastrophic outcomes. At the -2 percent annual rate of contraction required by Professor Li's "medium-green" scenarios, economies would eventually shrink by an amount close to that Depression-era 55 percent, but over a period of more than 40 years, not four.

Interesting stuff. Red, raw meat for the scoffers, since James Lovelock is mentioned.

Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.

Five Chinese oil workers kidnapped in Sudan died during a botched rescue attempt, the Foreign Ministry said Tuesday.

China was involved in the rescue effort led by Sudan, ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said. She confirmed that two other workers had been rescued and two more remained in captivity. <...>

Rebels have previously warned Chinese and other oil firms to leave the country, saying their operations help support the government in Khartoum. <...>

Sudan's government has blamed rebels from Darfur for kidnapping the Chinese, but on Monday a spokesman for the rebels denied involvement. The Chinese were snatched on Oct 18 while traveling near an oil field in the southwestern region of Kordofan.

It was the third attack on Chinese targets in the last 12 months.

A dog has risked its life to protect four kittens trapped in a house fire in Melbourne, Australia.

Firefighters found Leo guarding the kittens which were in a cardboard box in one of the bedrooms.

When the fire broke out inside the house, the family of four plus their other dog managed to escape.

A passenger on a French train had to be rescued by firemen after having his arm sucked down the on-board toilet.

The 26-year-old victim was trapped when he tried to fish out his mobile phone, which had fallen into the toilet bowl, and fell foul of the suction system.

A member of the fourth generation of a family of oyster farmers, Thierry, 37, has brought an economics education to what has become the most famous name in oysters: Gillardeau.

The family's small private company, founded 110 years ago here by the sea near La Rochelle and the Île d'Oléron in western France, produces only "spéciales," oysters that are fleshier and, consequently, more expensive than the standard. The Gillardeau name has become associated with fine oysters, rather like Hermès for neckties.

Thierry's father, Gérard Gillardeau, 61, took over the business from his father, Jean, who ran it after his father, Henri, who began as an illiterate farmhand before turning his hand to oysters. Oyster farming then dominated the economy of the region, where the Charente and Seudre Rivers add their fresh water to the salt flats and estuaries.

Henri did well enough to build a large house opposite City Hall in this village of 3,500 people, a house he called "Ça m'suffit," or "That'll do." Thierry and Véronique live there today with their two children.

A passenger on a French train had to be rescued by firemen after having his arm sucked down the on-board toilet.

The 26-year-old victim was trapped when he tried to fish out his mobile phone, which had fallen into the toilet bowl, and fell foul of the suction system.

The high-speed TGV train had to stop for two hours while firemen cut through the train's pipework.

Theories vary about why more people appear to be cheating. Among older people, a host of newer drugs and treatments are making it easier to be sexual, and in some cases unfaithful -- Viagra and other remedies for erectile dysfunction, estrogen and testosterone supplements to maintain women's sex drive and vaginal health, even advances like better hip replacements.

"They've got the physical health to express their sexuality into old age," said Helen E. Fisher, research professor of anthropology at Rutgers and the author of several books on the biological and evolutionary basis of love and sex.

In younger couples, the increasing availability of pornography on the Internet, which has been shown to affect sexual attitudes and perceptions of "normal" behavior, may be playing a role in rising infidelity.

But it is the apparent change in women's fidelity that has sparked the most interest among relationship researchers. <...>

Dr. Fisher notes that infidelity is common across cultures, and that in hunting and gathering societies, there is no evidence that women are any less adulterous than men. The fidelity gap may be explained more by cultural pressures than any real difference in sex drives between men and women. ...

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.

Laurence Ferrari was hailed as the most glamorous presenter when she took over as anchor on the main French evening news this summer -- an observation that has proved to be her undoing.

Her blonde hair, glossy lipstick and youthful smile were blamed for driving away viewers, particularly the over-60s, forcing the TF1 channel to order an overhaul of her look in an attempt to halt a drop in ratings.

Ferrari was told to change her haircut, make-up and clothes to appear less sexy and closer to her age -- 42. Her tight white jumpers have been replaced by dark waistcoats; her hair now hangs soberly over her ears, her lipstick is softer and lines can be seen around her eyes and mouth.

Supporters of Ferrari said that she was a victim of prejudice against blondes and that she had given the news a more serious tone. Her glitzy image was an obstacle to her efforts to move the programme upmarket, however. Le Point, a weekly news magazine, said that TF1 executives had now decided that "Laurence Ferrari must become older, be transformed from the glamorous, young newcomer into a well-behaved, upper-class woman".